


Pray for the Wicked on the Weekend

by thought



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, POV Second Person, Spirit Albarn's terrible taste
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-11 17:44:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15977303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: Things that Spirit Albarn is good at, a non-comprehensive list including: crying at parties, killing things, and Franken Stein, unfortunately.





	Pray for the Wicked on the Weekend

**Author's Note:**

> The title is exactly what you think it is and I'm not sorry, I am living my best life. With thanks/blame to 14CombatGeisha's for informing me this show exists, and perpetual appreciation to Psidn for going on these adventures with me.

You're very good at a lot of things, not that most people would know it. You're good at thinking on your feet. Good at resonating fast and efficient with a meister. Good at fighting without a meister, if it comes to it. Good at the logistics, even good at being a leader if you need to.

It's just, you're good at a few other things, too. Good at having too many feelings at the worst times. Good at denial. Good at making bad choices.

Yeah. That last one. That's a big one.

You're thirteen on your first day of school and a younger boy with eyes like thin ice and a scalpel smile looks at you like you're his favourite renewable resource. Sure. Great. You've always wanted to be wanted.

You're sixteen and crying silently in the kitchen at a party and when you look up there's a bottle of vodka on the counter. Sure. Great. Maybe all these feelings that you can't seem to get away from will matter a little less.

You're seventeen and when you wake up in the morning there's a cut down the inside of your upper arm that you don't remember getting. That's fine. You can be forgetful, sometimes.

You're eighteen and a girl with windswept hair and a scar from every country she's visited cradles your face like the emotional climax to a dime store novel and says "I can save you. I want to help." Well. See above. You are still starved for wanting.

Sometimes you think your daughter is the only good choice you ever made, and she doesn't even want to speak to you.

You probably should have learned what it felt like to make a good choice and held on to that. Positive reinforcement. Hindsight is 20/20 and best observed face down on a sticky bartop.

A woman with silver hair shoves you to your knees in an anonymous hotel room. A man with kindness in his smile licks tequila off your fingers and he even makes sure to swipe his tongue over your wedding ring. You cry at a lot more parties, and of the only two phone numbers you know when your drunk, one has been disconnected and the other rings through to the answering machine you recorded together the night you brought your daughter home from the hospital.

Years go by. You get older, which is terrifying. You kill a lot of things. Relationships. People. Brain cells. Hopes. Just another thing you're good at.

You dance your daughter around a school gymnasium and the music makes your hangover worse and you keep your jacket buttoned to hide the blood on your shirt. Ordinary humans, but they were harbouring a witch.

"It's not your place to ask questions, Death Scythe."

You don't think you made it home last night, which explains why your wife glares at you when you come towards her. You think probably you should say something but then there's a different woman looping your arm through hers, and when she asks if she can have the next dance the diplomatic courtesy you've learned at Lord Death's side has you saying yes before you can think better of it.

You lose a decade. You lose a third of your fucking life, Spirit, and when your wife sits down across from you at the kitchen table in the apartment you bought together and says "I'm leaving," it feels like coming up from a morphine haze to an empty hospital room.

You aren't surprised. Well, surprised she held out this long, though the burned out light bulbs and grimy countertops, and the way Maka packs her own lunch and folds her own clothes make you wonder if maybe she left a long time ago and you just didn't notice.

You expect her to take Maka with her when she goes. You're apparently the only one.  
"Mom is going on an adventure," Maka says. "I have to stay in school and become a great meister so that when I'm grown up I can go with her."

"Fucks sake, Albarn," Azusa says. "Your taste didn't exactly improve after Stein, you just found a totally different kind of fucked up."

"We'll sign her up for introductory courses," Lord Death says, patting your shoulder. "You won't have to worry about a thing."

You want to say that you want to worry. You want that responsibility. You want everyone to expect better of you. Probably you should have wanted this ten years ago. You're a little late.

Not a lot changes, but you find you sleep easier now, are more quick to laugh. You don't feel sick to your stomach all the time, and when you come home now the fear of loneliness isn't as catastrophic as it used to be.

You expect Maka's mother to come back. The hero returning home in a victorious parade, or even mid-journey, in a time of crisis, returning for wisdom before a final battle. In less literary terms, you expect her to visit her own daughter once in a while.

You and Maka never speak ill of her, even when Maka's birthday passes without a card and she follows in your footsteps, crying in the kitchen at a party. At least the only thing on the counter is cake. At least the people coming to comfort her don't want anything more from her than what she wants to give. At least she knows what she can give without destroying herself in the process.

You're so busy waiting for your now ex-wife to come back that when it's Stein who appears from the abyss of top-secret DWMA 'haven't any of you heard of a telephone, welcome to the 21st century motherfuckers' international business, you're caught with all your defenses down. And he apparently sees Maka first, which is. Well. At least she would have been far too young to remember him. You all were. Kids raising kids and fucking it up. None of you had any idea what you were doing, and yet here you and Stein and Marie, too, soon, are playing at adulthood and still just messes under the surface. Amazing that Maka turned out perfect despite it all.

You panic because Stein's there, and then you don't, and then you're resonating together like no time has passed at all and you panic about how you're not panicking. You tell yourself you're not going to fuck this up. No bad choices this time.

The problem is, you don't know what the bad choices are. The problem is, Stein treats you with the professional respect afforded your position but reaches over to fix your hair before a meeting like it's normal, like it's his right. The problem is Stein calls you his weapon and you don't correct him. The problem is Stein isn't sorry, but that's always been the problem.

"I want to be your weapon without worrying I'm going to wake up one day cut open on your lab table."

"Yes, well," Stein says, looking down at you from his high horse of sobriety, "I'd imagine your ex-wife wanted a husband who didn't spend his time fucking his way through every bar in the city, but here we are."

Stein tries to walk you home after that, but you look him right in the eye and you tell him you can get back on your own and he leaves without protest. You realize he's the only person who doesn't think you can't be trusted to know your own capabilities in one way or another. You don't know if it's that he trusts you, or just that he knows you so well he would know if you ever lied about it. Maybe it doesn't really matter which. Maybe it should, though.

The next morning you have a small existential crisis over instant coffee with Stein sitting silently across from you in your living room. You want to be Stein's weapon. After everything. Because apparently you're just that fucked up.

"It would have been better if you had woken up," Stein says. "During one of the experiments. You always know how to stop me."

"I still would have left," you lie.

He frowns at you, then winces. "Oh."

"You don't resent me for leaving," you say, because somehow this is only now making sense. "You resent me for taking another meister."

"She made you a death weapon."

"No. It's a partnership. I killed an arbitrary number of beings. You helped with some, she helped with some. Neither of you made me into anything. Neither of you went through the training you get once you've graduated. I built my career myself."

Stein takes a sip of his coffee. "All right, that's fair."

It isn't until much later, once the dust has settled, that you think back to that conversation and understand.

"What were you planning to do?" you ask as soon as Stein opens the door to his lab. "Talk me out of it? Kidnapping? Refuse to fight that last battle?"

"You credit my younger self with far too much self-awareness."

"I don't know if that makes it better or worse."

"Better for you. Embarrassing for me."

"There are things about a person that don't change." He opens his mouth to speak but you talk over him. "I'm Maka's dad. I'm your weapon. My job doesn't change that." You try to project confidence, because between the two of you one of you always needs to be the strong one.

"You're Lord Death's--"

"Employee. Former student. Friend, I hope. But he's Lord Death. I'm sure as hell not his partner. And that's what it means to be weapon and meister."

Stein takes a step back and for one fleeting moment you think he's pulling away, you think all this goddamn soul-searching has been for nothing. But then, carefully, he extends a hand, the same hand he holds out when he wants you to transform.

"Do you want to come in?"

So. You make another bad choice. Or you make a good choice. Let's just say: you make a choice.

**Author's Note:**

> Come yell at me on [tumblr](http://thought-42.tumblr.com)


End file.
